FILM FEATURE: SIGHTSEERS AT THE ARENA CINEMA

Chris (Steve Oram) and Tina (Alice Lowe) in Sightseers.

The new look

By Ed Rampell

The recent hacking to death of an off-duty English soldier by Islamist zealots in broad daylight in London chips away at that British reserve and the thin veneer of the Brits’ renowned stiff upper lip. Now comes the U.K. indie film, Sightseers, which is a sort of demented On the Road meets Thelma and Louise meets Bonnie and Clyde, with a dash of Manson tribe sprinkled on top for good measure.

Kill List's Alice Lowe and Steve Oram co-star as the thirty-something losers from Losersville, Tina and Chris, in this road trip-cum-black comedy gone horribly wrong, which the actors also co-wrote with Amy Jump.

It's England’s Midlands: Tina lives at home with her ailing, overbearing, over possessive mother and has earned degrees in canine psychology that aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. (Aidst the gallows humor dogs play a fairly important role.) Tina embarks on an ill-advised week-long jaunt through the Midlands with Chris -- whom Tina seems to barely know -- in his “caravan” (that’s trailer, to we Yanks). We find out along the way that the bearded Chris, who has a bald spot, has been “made redundant."

At first they are hot to trot for one another as the couple drives about the Midlands, which includes some spectacularly dramatic scenery that mirrors the mood of this movie and its gloomy characters who are a sort of Heathcliff and Cathy gone off the rails. A series of seemingly trivial incidents set Chris, and then Tina off, as they embark on an odyssey that becomes a killing spree in this Ben Wheatley-directed movie. The authorities (who, as usual, are clueless -- no Sherlocks they) can’t make heads or tails out of the unfolding mayhem, which may be because it seems to have no rhyme or reason. As their crimes escalate the couple’s sexual ardor for one another inversely perversely cools -- very Freudian (Sigmund ended up in England, by the way).

Making a personal appearance at Arena Cinema, where Sightseers has an exclusive run through May 30, a rather fetching Lowe spoke about the film. In discussing Sightseers, which alternates between the bone chilling and the hilarious, Lowe cast some light on the filmmakers’ intent. Class envy is one of the elements that fuels the rampage of the couple, neither of whom have a full-time job in Tory Prime Minister David Cameron’s austerity-wracked not-so-Great Britain. In lieu of the fulfillment that worthwhile work and a full family and social life could provide them, running amok gives Tina and Chris kicks and thrills. They can’t get no satisfaction, so they turn to senseless crime.

Holding a meat-cleaver dripping with blood, one of the extremist fanatics who sliced and diced that British soldier was ready for his close-up. He melodramatically declared right into a camera lens: "We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone." (Bin Laden also said similar things like “if you leave us alone we’ll leave you alone.”) One wonders if the Western imperial powers, which are endlessly sticking their noses where they don’t belong into other people’s business, are listening? Probably not, so the tit-for-tat goes on in a vicious cycle of ceaseless violence.

Tina and Christian are not fundamentalists but, similarly, are the West’s powers-that-be listening to the restiveness of their own rootless  generation spawned by austerity? From the indignados of Spain to the Greek rioters to the 2011 English looters to America’s occupiers and so on, to quote Arthur Miller’s plaintive plea regarding in Death of a Salesman “attention must be paid.”

Like the fading Willy Loman attention must be paid to the Lowe woman and Oram man in Sightseers. This low-budget indie was actually released in the U.K. last November. In a sense, it is a motion picture prophecy of the brutal, senseless street carving of that British drummer, as it taps into the zeitgeist of a troubled nation roiling beneath the surface, as cutbacks, unemployment and more wreaks havoc.


Sightseers runs through May 30 at the Arena Cinema, 1625 N. Las Palmas Ave., Hollywood, CA. For more info see: http://www.arenascreen.com/.

 

 

 

TRIBECA 2012: FIRST WINTER

A scene from First Winter.

Tragically hip

By Don Simpson

At some point in the past, Paul (Paul Manza) convinced some of his cutest female yoga students to travel with him to his secluded farmhouse. It is an extremely cold winter and the power has gone out, thus transporting the utopian household back to a time before heat and electricity. Their cultish lifestyle becomes an adventure for the presumably privileged class, a time to play “hippie commune circa 1969.”

The Brooklyn hipsters continue with business as usual — participating in a daily regimen of yoga and meditation, filling in the remaining hours of the days with sex and drugs. But the promiscuously enlightened air cannot withstand the stresses of time, frigid weather, and tyrannical rationing of food. The restrictive seclusion of the location does not help matters either. Except for a lone radio, there is no connection with the outside world. Their days are numbered but Paul has lulled his flock of housemates into a sheepish state of submission.

What is writer-director Ben Dickinson telling us? Is he metaphorically predicting the demise of Brooklyn hipsters? Has this tight knit, holier-than-thou subculture cut themselves off from reality to the point of no return? Will their carefree lifestyle of yoga, meditation, slow food, and free love bring about their death?

LAFF 2011: SPOTLIGHT ON CUBA

A scene from Ticket to Paradise.

The revolution shall be screened

By Ed Rampell

The Los Angeles Film Festival (LAFF) is currently taking place (mostly) in Downtown Los Angeles through June 26, and this year’s multitude of movies includes the program, International Spotlight: Cuba.

Featuring four features and documentaries, complementing, but actually separate from this year’s spotlight on Cuban cinema, is the world premiere of Unfinished Spaces, which is actually in the Documentary Competition and made by Yanqui filmmakers Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray.

Unfinished Spaces is the amazing true story of the ongoing struggle to build the Cuban National Arts Schools. According to the documentary, the idea for the schools emerged shortly after the revolution, when Commandantes Fidel Castro and Che Guevara showed up unannounced at Havana’s poshest country club to play a round of golf, a sport of the idle rich. While on the manicured links a light bulb was illuminated above Castro’s head, and full of revolutionary zeal, he decided that instead of being an aristocratic preserve for the high and mighty, the country club should be transformed into not one, but five schools for the arts – theatre, dance, painting, music, etc. – that would train a new generation of artists to give shape to and express the revolution. “Cuba will count as having the most beautiful academy of arts in the world,” Castro declared in 1961. 

Half a century later, that school dreamt up by Castro remains to be completed, and its trial and tribulations have been tied to the ebbs and flows of the Cuban Revolution. The three architects -- the Cuban Ricardo Porro and the Italian transplants Vittorio Garatti and Roberto Gottardi -- envisioned avante garde forms in order to literally give shape to Castro’s commission and to the Revolution itself. However, this emphasis on style fell out of favor as “formalism” was eschewed and Cuba grew increasingly allied with the Soviet Union, in favor of Stalinist style architecture that emphasized function instead of aesthetics. Of course, economics played a role, and during periods of hardship funding was cut for the schools. Most recently, hurricanes halted construction and restoration efforts.

Nevertheless, throughout its ups and downs the schools have trained generations of Cuban artists, even as the jungle threatened to reclaim the campuses and turn the site into something similar to ancient ruins. Castro’s personal role in the development of the schools is intriguing and late in the film Castro surprisingly reappears.

Unfinished Spaces examines the role of the revolutionary artist in the Revolution. It is something of a cautionary tale: In the heady early days of revolutions, flush with Promethean victory, anything seems possible. Toward the beginning of the documentary we see Castro, Guevara and the guerrillas triumphantly enter Havana, and there’s the sense that a new millennium will be ushered in. But revolutions, alas, have their Thermidors, their setbacks and even reversals. The saga of the schools and of the architects who designed them reflects this process.

At the world premiere of Unfinished Spaces in the Regal Cinemas at L.A. LIVE the three companeros were reunited, and after seeing the finished film for the first time the architects participated in a Q&A session in the packed theater. Although they are now senior citizens, they called to mind the Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s saying: “There’s no grey hair in my soul." 

As part of its International Spotlight series, LAFF is also screening a feature about (and made on location in) Cuba, co-writer/director Fina Torres’ sexy comedy with liberal doses of magical realism, Habana Eva. The Venezuela-born Torres is quite an accomplished filmmaker, who previously made the 2000 Penelope Cruz pic, Woman on Top, 1995’s Celestial Clockwork and 1985’s Oriana. 

Screened during last year's Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Habana Eva is the tale of Eva (Prakriti Maduro), a Cuban seamstress who has her designs on becoming a haute couture fashion designer, but her entrepreneurial flair and initiative is stifled by a factory bureaucrat in this parable of the dilemmas facing contemporary Cuba under Raul, not Fidel, Castro. Eva is wooed by two lovers – one of them representing Cuban socialism, the other, a Cuban born photographer who lives in Venezuela, symbolizing bourgeois values. Eva’s amusing choice is a prophecy of Cuba’s current move away from socialist economic orthodoxy and a far cry from the revolutionary zeal of Humberto Solas’ famed 1968 Cuban feminist film, Lucia.

Like Polynesian vahines (women), Cuban muchachas were famed for their beauty and sensuality, and Cuban women epitomized the silver screen stereotypes of those “hot Latin lovers.” In Habana Eva Torres seems to be toying with these torrid tropical tropes. But, ideology aside, the problem with this movie is that Eva’s friend, Teresa (Yuliet Cruz), outshines her in all of the scenes they appear in together. Teresa is simply sexier, prettier, funnier and more likable and vivacious than Eva (even when she’s dead and becomes a Fellini-esque Yuliet of the spirits!). Cruz simply steals every scene she graces. When she’s offscreen viewers may make that Shakespearian pleading: “Wherefore art thou Yuliet?” To top matters off, Yuliet is actually Cuban, while Prakriti Maduro is Venezuelan. The comparison between the two is similar to comparing Natalie Wood as Maria and Rita Moreno as Anita in West Side Story. But this is a quibble; Habana Eva is a rollicking sex farce with great location shooting in Cuba, charmingly sprinkled with magical realist (not socialist realist!) motion picture pixie dust.

The other films in the series spotlighting Cuba are the documentary Operation Peter Pan: Flying Back To Cuba; the 2003 film, Suite Habana, and the feature, Ticket To Paradise, set during Cuba’s “special period” following the collapse the Soviet Union.

For more information on LAFF 2011's International Spotlight on Cuba: Cuba Spotlight.

FILM FEATURE: PAGE OSTROW

Producer Page Ostrow

Producing pictures of importance

By Ed Rampell

The fact that Beverly Hills-based Page Ostrow is the daughter of two Holocaust survivors has contributed to rather than hampered her success in the highly competitive, male-dominated movie world. The profound life lessons Ostrow absorbed from her parents -- who met in Germany after their liberation from different concentration camps -- have served this producer’s representative well.

“Around 1960 my father came to Toronto without two nickels to rub together, and he went on to have the second largest manufacturing company of leather coats in Canada,” proudly states Ostrow, President of Ostrow and Company.

Ostrow developed the sharp, shrewd negotiating skills necessary for obtaining distribution for hundreds of films and navigating Hollywood’s shark infested waters by paying close attention to and implementing strategies she learned from her Dad, a self made businessman.

“I worked with my father for four years, learning how to do business the old school way, which includes having the long view of building close relationships with clients and associates,” said Ostrow.

But more important than the business acumen Ostrow accumulated from her family is the ethos bestowed by parents who endured Bergen-Belsen, Gross-Rosen and other slave labor camps. Indeed, as one of a handful of the film industry’s producer’s representatives, Ostrow is on a movie mission, using her savvy deal making skills to secure outlets and film financing for socially aware indie features and documentaries that might otherwise fall by the wayside amidst Hollywood’s focus on big budget glitz, glamour and escapism. Ostrow hooks up independent, hard hitting filmmakers with distributors who release their work worldwide on all platforms, including theatrical, television, home entertainment/ VOD (video on demand), Internet and all ancillary rights.

“We’re fortunate to represent quality films,” said Ostrow. “Films of conscience with cinematic vision meet with our commitment and strategy toward championing a new global reality”

The specialty cinema Ostrow and Company represents includes Juvies, a documentary about juvenile offenders tried as adults by what the firm’s website calls “a kind of vending machine justice.” The 2004 doc aired on HBO.

Heavens Fall is a 2006 dramatization of the infamous Scottsboro Boys court case, wherein nine Blacks were falsely accused of raping two Southern white women during the 1930s, starring David Strathairn, Timothy Hutton and Leelee Sobieski. Mohammed Gohar’s 2008 The Anti-Bin Laden is an award winning nonfiction look at the Egyptian televangelist and businessman, Amar Khaled, who preaches a moderate vision. Stolen Childhoods is a doc narrated by Meryl Streep about forced child labor. The firm’s 200-plus titles also include feel good movies like Dating Games People Play and Summer Dreams.

A day in this producer’s representative’s hectic life reveals her to be a whirlwind of activity. At her office, located a stone’s throw from Rodeo Drive, Ostrow and her team seem to need eight arms each to get through in-house meetings, nonstop phone calls and emails from around the globe. Ostrow works the phone with an ease Alexander Graham Bell would marvel at, negotiating contracts with filmmakers and distributors, navigating the finer points of a deal with studio executives to win her producers bigger payoffs.

The firm’s busy pace became fever-pitched during Egypt’s revolutionary turmoil, when Mohammed Gohar, CEO of Video Cairo Sat, made frantic long distance calls to Ostrow and Company, declaring that VCS’ “150 employees are holed up in my office for nine days now with the lights dimmed to protect from looters and security at our door protecting us. We’re providing satellite, crew and information to all the reporters from around the world here in Egypt. We’re currently missing three of our team who went out as crew to report and have not returned.”

The child of Holocaust survivors empathizes with the desperate Egyptian, and asks, “How can I help?” “Just watch our film,” replies Gohar, who, via satellite, sends Ostrow a link to The Last Breath, arguably the first documentary chronicling the events leading up to Egypt’s revolution and the people’s power revolt there. Viewing the doc, Ostrow and her staff are, she says, “amazed by the uncanny predictions detailed in the film which are now a reality in Egypt,” and the producer’s rep signs a contract with Gohar to represent The Last Breath.

Ostrow’s team includes 30 cinema scouts who travel the film festival circuit and trade shows all over the world, including Toronto (Ostrow’s hometown), Austin (where the South By Southwest Festival is taking place this week), the Bahamas, Utah (home of Robert Redford’s Sundance), the French Riviera (Cannes), Santa Monica (the American Film Market), etc. Every day there’s another film festival somewhere; Ostrow’s team covers most of them. At these venues producers seeking distribution for character driven feature films and socially relevant documentaries are encouraged to submit their work for consideration. An in-house team of executives review each and every film submitted for filtration to see which are suitable for producer's representation.

Those selected are then offered a deal in exchange for a retainer and percentage of business done by Ostrow’s multimillion dollar Beverly Hills outfit, which has access to film distributors in various mediums and platforms. Filmmakers may know their art, but Ostrow – who has worked for distributors such as Graham King (The Aviator; The Departed) for 10 years and on her own as a producer’s rep for another decade -- has the business savvy, contacts and database to ensure producers find audiences for their work.

But this Beverly Hills wheeler-dealer isn’t only in it for the moolah. Remembering her roots, Ostrow supports Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, recording testimonials of thousands of survivors of Hitler’s genocide. In 2004 she served on the board of directors of the National Council for Jewish Women, serving as an activist as well. Ostrow was also the first Hollywood entertainment executive invited to speak at the United Nations Film Festival in New York.

“The noblest search is the search for excellence,” Ostrow stresses. “Could I have made more money doing slasher films and movies with gratuitous sex and violence? I don’t even think about it; there’s many ways to make money. Feature films and socially conscious documentaries are the kinds of films I like to represent. I’d rather leave a legacy, change lives and have an impact. There’s an audience for these types of films."

Another Harvest Moon is one of these films. Starring Doris Roberts, Piper Laurie, Anne Meara, Richard Schiff, Cybill Shepherd and Cameron Monaghan, the film is scheduled for an April release in selected theaters. The movie deals with the circle of life in three generations of a family and stars Ernest Borgnine, who just won the Screen Actors Guild’s Life Achievement Award.

While growing up in Toronto Ostrow was bitten by the movie bug after seeing the 1972 anti-Nazi musical, Cabaret, starring Liza Minnelli, Michael York and Joel Grey.

“When I first started going to Cannes,” she recalls, “I brought with me the Time Magazine that had on the cover a Holocaust survivor in the camps behind electric wires, in black and white uniform, and it said: ‘Love Letters From the Camps.’ Even during the times of the concentration camps people actually sent love letters back and forth. And I thought, ‘If they could do that, and have hope and be brave, then I can certainly handle what any of the notoriously difficult Hollywood players or studio executive at Cannes can throw my way as a young woman deal making on the Croisette of the French Riviera.’ Courage is never letting your actions be dictated by fears.”

Page Ostrow has survived and thrived in Tinseltown, enhancing the cinema scene by championing the indie and the underdog.